90 Jane Stuart-Smith, Eleanor Lawson and James M. Scobbie
sociophonetic studies (e.g. Foulkes et al. 2010), suggest that these abstract levels
likely relate to each other directly, as the result of persistent coupling in the system.
If we make this assumption (and it seems inevitable that we must),^7 an analogy
from ancient Greek society may be useful for considering the possible nature of the
relationship between these two abstract levels. Greek symbola were originally two
halves of the same object, each a symbolon, which could be fitted together for pur-
poses of personal recognition (Herman 1987). Only later in the classical period did
the meaning of the word symbolon shift from denoting part of a two-part tally, to
tokens which could be used like tickets in exchange for goods, continued in English
‘symbolic’. The original symbolon/symbola relationship had two key aspects: (1) each
symbolon could and did exist separately, for example, members of a dispersed fam-
ily could keep them for a long time; but each symbolon was only meaningful when
reunited with its partner (symbola). (2) Symbola could be formally similar, but each
half could also be different from each other (Harris 2000: 23).
The relationship between phonological and social abstractions emerging from
exemplar memory could be likened to the symbolon/symbola relationship.^8 Both
kinds of categorization, at whatever level, can and do exist separately, both for
analysts, and for speakers under particular conditions. For example, it is clearly
possible to undertake separate analyses of phonological structure, or of social
categorization, without reference to each other (Labov 2006). Speakers too can
access phonological categories without reference to social categories, e.g. in psy-
cholinguistic manipulation tasks, and social stereotypes can be retrieved with-
out automatically referring to speech. But we suggest that the usual situation for
speakers in daily interaction is that the social and phonological systems function
in a symbola relationship, namely they are linked or continually linking such that
“each is significant ... as a counterpart of the other” (Harris 2000: 23). Such an
analogy allows us to think about the social and phonological systems as having a
separate, yet co-emergent relationship at the abstract level. The links themselves
would be established through co-ordinated simultaneous activation, leading to
persistent coupling within and across the exemplar map, and hence the entrench-
ment of linked/linkable social and phonological categories (this kind of modeling
assumes activation and resonance discussed by Johnson 2006). At the same time,
prior knowledge encapsulated in such social–phonological linkages will serve to
mediate the treatment of subsequent input exemplars (Goldinger 2007).- Keith Johnson (p.c. 2011) notes the difficulty of two-dimensional graphical representions of
phenomena and processes that are (a) multidimensional and (b) thoroughly inter-related. - The symbola relationship could also be used metaphorically to refer to the special relation-
ships between entities; Aristotle’s account of speech and writing is given in these terms in the
introduction to his De Interpretatione, 16a3–8.